The sturdiest apps & games.

Author: Rob

When I originally made my Pet Timer app, I made it with one pet in mind. Bunny Timer was my first iOS release, and after a few months I thought I’d create two separate versions. Bunny Timer FREE (back when Apple allowed apps with the word ‘FREE’ in the title) would have basic functionality, while the full paid version of Bunny Timer would have more features and options.

To attract more users who might prefer other users who might prefer another pet, I created Dog Timer and Cat Timer, which both had their own free and a paid version. This left me with a total of six apps with very similar features. I eventually stopped testing each of these six apps for bugs, as I was focusing all my energy on my newer projects.

That’s why I decided to remove all six from the App Store, and do the sensible thing.

I’m creating one unified Pet Timer app for iOS, and I’ll be packing as many of the old featueres into it as I can.

This will be my first iOS app writing C# in what was once Xamarin Studio (now Visual Studio For Mac). Since I created the unified Android version of Pet Timer using this IDE, I should be able to reuse most of the code logic. That was my plan, but almost immediately I ran into a roadblock. Then I ran into another roadblock.

The first roadblock was the Xamarin iOS Designer. While it works perfectly well (provided you have Xcode installed) for dragging and dropping items from the Toolbox, the problem is creating constraints. For whatever reason, my version of Visual Studio didn’t have any way to create constraints other than adding the ‘recommended’ constraints.

After trying and failing to get these to work as needed, I looked on the Xamarin Forums where someone basically said don’t bother using the Xamarin iOS Designer for constraints. Instead they said to use Xcode, which is great because that’s what I’m used to. I created my entire menu UIViewController in Xcode, saved the file and went back to Visual Studio.

That’s when the second, much more difficult roadblock occurred.

I went to ViewController.cs and started typing the name of the label that shows the hours a user has selected. Visual Studio autocompleted the name, showing it was aware of the identifier I had set in Xcode. In ViewDidLoad I wrote a simple delegate that would handle when the user interacted with the UIStepper for hours:

This was a very simple thing to request, and yet when I built and ran the solution, nothing would happen. The UIStepper was aware of its minimum value (zero) as the minus button would grey out when it reached that value. But the label remained unchanged. I searched for a Xamarin or StackOverflow forum to help me, but had no luck.

As seems to happen very often when using Xamarin and Visual Studio, I went for the nuclear option. I created an entirely new Xamarin.iOS project, put a label on it, gave it an identifier, and set its value in ViewDidLoad(). That was successful, which made me think I could just import the old Main.Storyboard I created in Xcode and have that work, too.

I was mistaken.

However, I had the idea to delete the last character of the identifier, changing ‘hoursLabel’ to ‘hoursLabe’, and saving Main.Storyboard. Lo and behold, this identifier would autocomplete in ViewController.cs, and would respond to UIStepper changes by the user. I had to do this for all identifiers, and then change their names back to their original names.

TL;DR: Xamarin iOS Designer isn’t great for creating constraints and sometimes you’ve got to modify identifiers just so they’ll respond to basic events!

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This is my first post on this blog as myself: the developer that writes all the apps featured on this website. I thought now was a good time to write as myself, as it was solely my idea to bring new languages to Pet Timer on Android. How many languages, I hear you ask? There are now 4 new languages in the Amazon Appstore description, and there are 7 new languages in the app itself.

The way I’ve done these translations will be far from perfect, because to save time and money I used Google Translate.

Sorry in advance to the non-English speakers who download the app.

I tested Google Translate in the only way a person who only speaks one language (and doesn’t have any multilingual friends) can: by translating its foreign translations back into English. I know this isn’t a perfect technique, but I thought that if any major confusing translations occurred, in theory they would end up nonsensical when translated back.

The translations came back into English making a surprising amount of sense. Occasionally a word or phrase sounded a bit awkward, so I altered the source English that I translated the next time. Hopefully I did an okay job using Google Translate, but I know there will be mistakes and confusing mistranslations. That’s why I decided to put a button on the language selection page that allows users to quickly report translations that don’t make sense.

One day I hope to be able to employ people that competently translate my apps. Not only will there be much more certainty that translations actually make sense, but those people would be compensated for their efforts. I am yet to make enough money selling my apps for that, but I look forward to a time when I can. Thanks in advance to anyone who submits corrections to my translations. The time you volunteer makes my apps better, and I’m truly grateful.

Google Translate has helped me to translate 28 words and phrases in Pet Timer into 7 foreign languages. That makes nearly 200 words and phrases that are now accessible to more people.

When I decided to use Google Translate, I definitely felt like the results would be embarrassing, and I’m sure I’ll notice mistranslations that convey completely the wrong ideas. But the real reason I made this decision was a simple one: I find it embarrassing to sell apps worldwide that are only in English.

Especially online, English is an incredibly dominant language.

Not everyone can afford to learn English, and I want to make apps for those people.